Talks with Amanda Knox in prison by Rocco Girlanda

Author:Rocco Girlanda [Girlanda, Rocco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788898475094
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: VandA ePublishing
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

In another moment of my life I would never have noticed the invitation that I find in my post box at the Chamber of Deputies It’s for a photo exhibition that will be in Parliament for some days, inaugurated by the Minister of Justice together with other institutional authorities. Black and white photos of women and mothers in the Italian prisons, by the photographer Giampiero Corelli.

I decide to go see it the moment I have twenty minutes free from my work in Parliament. The photos were taken in the women’s prisons in various cities: Rome, Venice, Naples, Palermo,

Messina, Bologna, Milan, Genoa, Forlì. The introductory brochure says: “The delicate theme of a women in prison is treated by the author of the photos profoundly and delicately, and he manages to interpret the subject in a careful but not anguishing manner.”

Perhaps that’s so, but maybe because over these months of entering and leaving the prison, I feel a bit of oppression and suffering seeing the exhibition.

Women holding their babies of less than a year and walking towards an internal gate to a corridor where the guard waits for them in order to close the bars behind them. Women’s faces marked by time and past experiences. Faces marked by multiple piercings and a life on the fringes of society.

Visiting a prison changes something in you. You’re not the same when you leave those places and those eyes.

After dinner I go back to Gubbio, and driving alone in my car on the toll-road I still see the photos from the exhibition I saw in Parliament that morning.

And I relive, thinking of Amanda, the sensations of ‘Sliding Doors’, a film made some years ago with Gwyneth Paltrow as the lead, where her life is divided between two parallel alternatives. She takes the subway home and finds her boyfriend in bed with another woman. She reconstructs her life with a man she meets in the subway. Or, she misses the subway train, calls a taxi. All this takes more time and she finds only her boyfriend at home, and continues life with him while he keeps on cheating on her.

If Amanda had decided to do her studies in Germany where she has relatives, or in France? If she had arrived in Italy a year later? If she stopped in Rome where she told me she’d found a course in creating writing that the university in Seattle told her about? Her great curiosity and thirst for knowledge could have taken her anywhere. Meeting different people and seeing other and making it hard for me to imagine that today her life is, more than anything, a path of her destiny.

To understand what it means to be in prison in Italy, some numbers are useful. Certainly, the situation is different from one facility to another, and prisons like the one in Perugia are modern and exemplary, even though there are problems common to the entire Italian penitentiary system.

First of all, over the years, the prisoners have changed. Today, about 25 thousand are foreigners out of a total of about 66-67 thousand.

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